Sweaty Fantastic

It's funny, in some ways the journey into San Francisco - despite the fact that yesterday was my first time going the transit route - is intensely familiar, a neat parallel to my sanity-saving trips into New York from New Haven. It's a significantly longer trip, but also a much prettier one, and I am already getting to know the climbs and curves of highway 17 very well. Along with the resulting plethora of accidents and truck breakdowns and traffic backups, of course.

I went in yesterday for a little horniness - musical horns, that is: a cd-release show for my dear friend Mike's band, part of the Hornucopia festival. I met Yuliya at her work near the show, and we bar-hopped through the checkerboard of posh little Hayes Valley boutiques in preparation for Mike's musical genius, Yuliya picking up a few tabs for me as my life savings dwindled to a single lonely dollar (still crumpled in my wallet, thank you very much).

When drunk enough that she didn't notice that our last stop was a gay bar (five minutes into our beers: "ohh, look, a rainbow, this place is gay friendly!" "um, Yuliya? It's more than just friendly...") we headed down to the hipster-crowded venue and found Mike giving away his home-brewed pickles with cd purchases.

My god, does that man know his pickles. He is the wild ferment in his band's name - Zoyres Eastern European Wild Ferment, almost as much of a mouthful as the giant pickles themselves. Sharp and garlicky and briney and fucking yes yum.

The show opened with a bass clarinet quartet - Amazing. Four tall bearded men seated in a semi-circle pulling mad rhythms and deep rich sounds from four tall curved pipes, be still my heart! Zoyres followed, with beautiful booty-shaking klezmeresque magic, and even Yuliya, who claims to hate dancing, was carried along. Then came the headliners - the Extra Action Marching Band, notorious for their raunch and roll.

When they started up, lead onstage by three ball-gown'd and balaclava'd cheerleader/dancers, the floor was packed. The kind of packed where you can dance with your arms by your side, straight up over your head, or whacking into the people around you. And that was just the warm up. Halfway through the first song, the band started marching - off stage, and down into the center of the dancefloor. And as the tubas and trombones moved in, that little bit of comfort-between-strangers room was erased, and the floor became one mass of moving flesh, you couldn't not-dance if you wanted to, your body forced into movement by the bodies pressing up against all sides. Within 30 seconds, my light cotton shirt was completely translucent with sweat, only maybe a quarter of it my own.

I lost sight of Yuliya, I lost sight of my arms between the bodies, I danced with my eyes closed, my toes were stepped on, I stepped on toes, a tuba hit me on the head, the tuba player lay his hand there, I lay my hand on top of his, the band moved up and down from stage to floor, songs ended and began, band members shed their shirts, the dancers shed their dresses and their masks, body surfed out over the floor and then crawled on all fours through the pulsing crowd back towards the stage, lovely carnal chaos driven by beats and brass.

And then it was over. Yuliya and I shivered at the bus stop for ten minutes, then made it back to her place, where I met her kitten and then promptly passed out on the couch. By the time I woke up, she was off at work (and sending me text messages blaming me for her hangover), so I stole a piece of toast and walked down to the bus stop to begin my journey home.